Janet Daley was born in America where she began her political life on the Left as an undergraduate at Berkeley. She moved to Britain (and to the Right) in 1965 where she spent nearly twenty years in academic life before becoming a political commentator: all factors that inform her writing on British and American policy and politicians.

The death of Lady Thatcher: is that the end of conviction politics?

We knew it was coming but somehow – as people always say – when it happens, it is still a shock. Sometimes the death of a national leader is much more than simply the loss of an historic figure. For those too young to remember the Britain of the 1970s – in apparently irreversible decline, virtually ungovernable, all but unbearable as a place in which to try to live a pleasant and productive life – the impact of this day on the people who lived through it all will seem inexplicable. So we must try to explain.

The achievements are so well documented, the reversing of the tide of British economic and political life so fully recorded, the great personal triumph of courage and conviction so frequently attested that they scarcely need reiteration. (Although they will be rightly reiterated many times over in the coming days.) Perhaps what needs to be said for fear that it might be forgotten is that Margaret Thatcher was the definitive outsider in the game of Conservative politics which was – and is now again – only for insiders. She was an intruder on three separate grounds: she was a woman, she was Northern, and she was lower middle class. The last of these was easily the most objectionable both in the eyes of the Tory establishment and of the Leftwing intellectual snobs for whom she was forever "the grocer's daughter". Maybe it took an outsider to realise that nothing was impossible in a democracy if the people wished it – and the people did wish for what she was determined to deliver: trades union reform, national recovery and liberal (in the true sense of the word) economic reform.

Will we see that kind of conviction and personal bravery in our national leadership again? Someday perhaps, but I doubt that it will be in my lifetime.